The Virus Doesn't Care
The best conditions for mindfulness practice are not necessarily the most comfortable. It is far easier to experience a sense of ease or wholeness when the circumstances around us offer no challenge to the status quo of our lives.
As both individuals and business leaders, we believe that we have a specific place in life, a concrete status you perceive as either below or above someone else's. Sometimes, like today, something comes along to level the playing field. Something big comes along without warning to teach you that we are all this together. Any illusion of hierarchy or status is just that and a delusion.
In ancient Tibet, because the winters were so cold and the ground so hard from the freezing conditions, it was impossible for people to bury the dead. Because of this, they placed the deceased on communal burial grounds, right in the open. Wild animals would come there for nourishment because it so hard to find food in the depth of winter.
It was commonplace for monks to sit there and meditate so that they could rid themselves of any sense of superiority or separateness which would disturb their ability to reach clarity and enlightenment itself, and to experience a sense of oneness and unity with the world.
“Everything is changeable, everything appears and disappears; there is no blissful peace until one passes beyond the agony of life and death. Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.” – Buddha
Today, we face a great once-in-a-generation leveler. The Coronavirus doesn't care about your status, your company's profitability, your bank account, where you came from, your gender, or the color of your skin. The virus teaches us that we are all in this together, and not just the pandemic, but life itself. We are all human, and we are all going to eventually pass from this world, going somewhere that we can not bring our status, our wealth, gender, or our nationality.
Let us take a moment to sit quietly, relax our shoulders, deepen our breath, and remember that all around us, despite how safe you might feel, people are sick and are passing to a place where eventually we will also go. Breath deeply and know that you have no control, and relax into a sense of spaciousness and tranquility. That is your natural state: no status, no hierarchy, and no permanence.
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